


Eighteen Years, A History

by raregoose



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Canon Compliant, Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 06:46:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3240176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raregoose/pseuds/raregoose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kuvira is eight when she is brought to Zaofu, and the rest is history. Some fluffy and some angsty snapshots about Kuvira and Baatar Jr.'s time growing up in Zaofu, that all tie together, held by the recurring thread of their relationship together. This is basically just a collection of my headcanons about their childhoods and reasons for becoming the villains in the end. Includes spoilers up to the end of season 4 of LoK.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eighteen Years, A History

Kuvira is eight when she is brought into Zaofu, with a limp on one leg and tears that won't stop slipping from her chin. Suyin takes her to the estate, wipes her cheeks, tells her she will always have a home in Zaofu, and sends her to sleep in three year old Opal's room. When Baatar asks his wife, she bitterly explains how the girl's parents abandoned her on the side of the road. Baatar Junior is nine, and he watches her with wide eyes as Su holds her hand and shows her around the estate. When she is introduced to him, her name falling from her tongue like flower petals, he hides behind his mother's legs. Kuvira is eight, and has no mother's legs to hide behind.

Baatar Junior, age nine, loves to build. He is proudly presented, the oldest child, as "taking after his father", but even he sometimes overhears locals wondering how the Beifong legacy failed to produce a bender in their son, and his own parents' reply of their hopes that it'll "come to him eventually". By the time Junior is nine he's tried bending countless times, each unsuccessful. Soon enough he has given up on bending entirely, instead building things with tools just like he watches his mother make things with her hands and a magic he doesn't understand.

Within the year, Su has found a foster home for Kuvira, and also has given her a spot free of tuition in her dance program. When Su finds out the now nine year old can bend metal during a rehearsal gone wrong, she decides to be the child's teacher in both arts, dance and bending. Kuvira spends her time learning, dancing, playing with the other girls in her class, and looking up to Su.

Junior is twelve when, one night at a dinner to which Kuvira and her foster parents are invited, he watches the girl adjust her bangs to look more like his mother's at the table.

Junior starts to hit his teenage years and becomes more and more shy, tripping over both his words and feet. He gets glasses, and hates them. They fit awkwardly on his face and he seems to keep misplacing them. He is considerably less outgoing than the four year old twins and six year old Opal, but finds a friend in his fellow nonbending sister. She is the only one of four siblings that is like him, a disappointment to the legacy. Even Toph's face falls when she visits them and finds out her first grandson will never bend. Junior is only twelve, but even he can see the disappointment behind her empty eyes.

Junior's future is decided when he is thirteen and his father takes him as his official assistant and apprentice. It's because he is skilled at math and loves to build, but he knows in part of his soul that it's truly because it's simply easier for the son who is nothing special to live an un-extraordinary existence, as an extension of a father who gave him his name.

He is just starting to grow into himself when he is fourteen, awkward and lanky and misshapen in some spots. This is the year his mother drags him to a dance recital for the first time, complaints disregarded. She has no need to silence any complaints later, because it's this same night when Junior watches Kuvira dance for the first time, her braid whipping gracefully behind her and her arms floating around her in time with the music. She makes eye contact with him at the end of the recital and he turns away so she won't see his flushed cheeks. He pats down his bangs before she sees him again, trying to tame the unruly cowlicks.

Kuvira would dance at Su's studio for another ten years, and Junior would never miss a single recital after his first.

Kuvira is thirteen, in a rush to leave rehearsal and metalbending on her shoes, when Su makes an offhand remark that she would be an excellent addition to her guard. Her bending had come a long way since her accidental discovery of the skill at age nine, and in her bending lessons she begins to find that Su is teaching her moves that the guard uses. She never before this point had thought about her future, but now finds this idea steeped into every aspect of day-to-day life, through teachers and her foster parents and now Su. Kuvira is only thirteen, but has decided on her own terms to join Zaofu's guard as soon as Su will allow. Su is her hero and her role model; she can't imagine a different path.

Su takes Kuvira as an assistant when she is only fifteen, taking her around in her free time and, more importantly, introducing her to the guard and showing Kuvira exactly what they do. Kuvira bounces on her toes like she does at dance rehearsal, watches everything with keen eyes, and every so often adjusts her bangs. Su never mentions how the girl wears her bangs so similarly to her own, just smiles and places a hand on her shoulder.

Junior gets to know Kuvira the year he is sixteen, the two both trailing behind their respective employer, Kuvira waiting on Su's beck and call when she isn't studying or dancing, Junior carrying piles of blueprints until his arms ache, even taking some to school, stashed away into his bag for working on later. When Su and Baatar are together, so are Kuvira and Junior.

They become close friends and even closer allies quickly. He maintains for a full year that he doesn't have feelings for her, until he can't hide it anymore, not wanting to face any romance for fear of rejection. But she is a wide-eyed fifteen year old and finds herself crushing on the cute boy a year older than her. Su, at the time, watches them closely and is elated at the idea of her protégé and her oldest son being together. In eight years, the same idea would become repulsive to her.

Kuvira is stoic and determined, with a hard exterior that Junior grows to love for its deception of the bright idealistic girl beneath. She views him calculatedly and objectively, not with the rose colored glasses of a girl with a crush. She still adores him, despite his lack of elegance, for his transparent caring for all things and his inquisitiveness about the world. She wants to make the world a better place; he wants to understand it.

Sometimes, Junior and Kuvira sit in the grass outside the schoolhouse and talk for hours during time off from working. She never calls him Junior once, insisting that he is Baatar, and deserves to be called by his real name. He flushes every time he hears the name that most people refuse to call him, but it isn't until one morning before school when he is seventeen and she asks him to braid her long hair for him that he realizes he can't hide his feelings for her from himself any longer. She smiles back at him when he finishes the braid and tells him, Baatar, that he is excellent. He flushes again, and this time he knows why.

The same year, when he is seventeen and she sixteen, Su officially invites Kuvira to join her guard. She is the youngest to ever join, but still gets immediate respect. The other guards cannot bring themselves to bully a sixteen year old girl, especially not when she is so important to Su, and is also both strong from years of dancing and a great bender from her lessons with the matriarch. She is a natural guard, a great work ethic drilled into her already and a strong desire to help the city and serve Su ingrained in her brain from the moment she was saved from the street.

Junior is finishing up his secondary schooling around this time, and slips easily into a full time job working with his father. Baatar gives him blueprints and Junior does what he is told. He is a model child, perfectly content to do what his parents want, unlike the brooding fourteen year old Huan and the overly excitable nine year old twins. Opal is eleven, and still one of Junior's closest friends. In absence of bending, she has also taken up dancing. She looks up to Kuvira at dance and teases Junior for a crush that, to her, is obvious. She likes to hang out in Junior's workroom, the repurposed attic looking out over the courtyard where the guards do their drills, and she giggles whenever she catches him looking at Kuvira in her uniform.

Junior graduates the following year, top of his class. He is asked to give a speech, and he goes without a second thought to his friend for help. Kuvira is a natural public speaker and already a leader within the guard. She tells him to be confident and that he's going to be fine. When she compliments his intelligence and touches his arm, he misses her blush because he's trying so hard to hide his own. When he makes his speech, he finds her sitting in the audience between Suyin and Opal, her hair down uncharacteristically. His graduation party that night is lavish and too much, Su pulling out all the stops for her eldest. He hides in his workroom for hours and watches everyone else celebrate from his window.

The next year, Kuvira skips her graduation. She has work, and her foster parents are now bedridden, too old and sickly to even think of attending such an event.

Kuvira is only a week from her nineteenth birthday when her only superior retires and she is named Captain of the guard. She is unrivaled in skill and strength, and it doesn't hurt that she is Su's favorite. Her first kiss is with a cadet on the guard when she is seventeen, but she is many miles his superior despite being the same age, so the romance deflates. Kuvira also knows her heart lies with Baatar, the boy with ever broken glasses and hands that fidget when he isn't performing calculations. She has known him long enough to see him as perfect in his imperfection, and knows herself well enough to know she can't just let go.

The two manage to somehow see each other more often than they used to in these transitional years to adulthood. They seem to always be around each other, Kuvira always at Su's side in her armor and rigid stance, Junior trailing behind his father with a blueprint and a wrench most of the time. They spend mornings bringing each others' favorite drinks to them, spend the afternoons sneaking glances and making faces at each other when they pass each other in the city, and spend the nights talking long into the darkness over radio, the machines Baatar helped design crackling over breathy laughs while they try not to wake their parents. Opal asks why they aren't married yet and the officers on the guard tease Kuvira mercilessly, but neither makes a romantic gesture. Kuvira is worried about losing her position on the guard by dating her boss' son. Junior fears rejection from the woman he sees as a supernova.

Little do either know that Su and Baatar are both trying their best to get them married. Baatar pesters his son with questions of girlfriends, prodding him towards Kuvira, and Su orchestrates events that will require both of their attendance. They dance around each other, flirting and joking, without ever doing more. She is afraid of her own emotions and their power over her, he is an overly emotional wreck most of the time trying to convince himself that these feelings are just his normal sensitivity at work.

Suyin and Baatar push, but nothing happens between the two for another four years, and by that time Su wants nothing more than for her son to leave Kuvira, regretting every moment she ever smiled at the innocent lingering touches she saw them sharing.

Kuvira is nineteen and beginning to understand how cold the world is when both of her foster parents die. She moves out of the family home into an apartment of her own. In her darkest time, she comes to see that the world passes her no favors. Not now, not when she was eight and left on the road, not ever. She thinks of the people of her nation who are suffering and feels compassion. She thinks of those hurting the kingdom and feels nothing but unbridled fury. 

She is twenty when words stop falling from her lips like flower petals. It's far too much work to be beautiful when she could be hard instead, hard like the steel under her command. She has a guard force to lead and a group of growing children whose dance class she now teaches. She can't waste time worrying about beauty.

Junior works on his twenty second birthday. His father says the project needs to be completed, and who is he to talk back? To rebel would be an embarrassment to the family. So he works on his birthday and says nothing. He sees Kuvira the next day and when she wishes him a happy twenty second and mentions that she can't wait for her twenty first in only a few months, he tucks the look of her smiling face away and promises to remember it. She had smiled so little recently, and he treasures the time they share and just be together without thinking of the pressures of the city.

Kuvira spends the year forgetting about her own troubles by focusing on other people's. She dives into work at the studio and in the guard, and works out in her free time. It has been many years since Su has given her a bending lesson, but the two still find time to spar. She never realized it when she was young, but learns now that Su truly is a ruthless fighter, and when Su teaches her moves that will kill even a man twice her size, she wonders how her mentor learned them herself. Su creates a fighting machine in Kuvira, one both dangerous and elegant in motion.

It doesn’t take his nearly ten years of engineering history for Baatar to know that the function of the domes is to keep people in, not danger out. His father tells him not to leave the domes; his mother tells him not to question his father. He is twenty two, almost twenty three, and he is a child in his parents’ eyes, Worse, he is a prisoner in the domes. In fantasy, he begins to plan his escape without realizing it, zoning out some days in his work to find himself thinking about slipping away in the night.

It is something he’d never do. He was never the rebellious kid, always the model child. There is Opal to think of, only sixteen and still innocent. Then, Kuvira. He holds onto dreams of marrying her one day, though they slip out of each other’s lives more and more every day. They each fall into a seclusion that is their own personal hell. He stuck in a job feeling disrespected and overlooked at every turn, she feeling the loss of her foster parents permeate every facet of her life and shutting down. She begins to dream of a perfect world where she can protect every lost child, he continues to wish for a time when he can escape the traps of an overprotected life.

She is twenty two when she realizes she is unsatisfied, the empty feeling in her chest left there by the need to do something, something besides hide in these domes. She listens to news over the radio wistfully and sits alone in her apartment, waiting for her moment to come. 

Suyin holds a festival in Zaofu when Amon is defeated, photos of Korra plastered around the city, pro-bending propaganda littered across the night. Junior and Opal hide out together in his workshop. They swap scary stories and take turns rushing into the outside to steal festival food. Junior feels like he doesn’t belong, part of him siding with the Equalist movement that his mother so despises. He doesn’t ask Opal her opinion; she is seventeen and, for the most part, doesn’t tangle herself in world news. 

Kuvira is on shift, watching the celebration from behind her armor and stony gaze. She relishes the defeat of a man who only wished to destroy, not unite, but wonders where Su’s heart lies, she who would slander the non-bending movement then go home to her non-bending husband and lie in safety while the Avatar and her own sister risked their lives. When she gets home that night, letting her long braid down from her helmet and lying back on her bed, she brushes her bangs out of her face and contemplates growing them out for the first time.

Junior begins to visit Kuvira on shift more and more often, compensating for the long stretches they lived apart in the wake of Kuvira's parents' death, showing her the blueprints of his own design that his father refuses to consider and every so often accidentally letting off frustrated steam. His father, who will not look at Junior’s original work, his father who overshadows him on every project, his father who will always be his boss. Kuvira listens intently, and understands. She may have no parents of her own, but she knows intimately the feeling of being alone while surrounded by thousands.

He is trying to replace the love he no longer feels for his parents, going out aimlessly, sitting alone in bars, attempting to find meaning in a caged existence, and he always comes back to her. She who will sit and listen. She who will console him at any hour over radio. She who does not confide in anyone but him about her own problems. 

She who calls him Baatar.

He has lived twenty three years as Junior when he finally decides to refer to himself as his given name.

They have plans for the world, in secret. Kuvira talks of taking down the domes and using the metal to build homeless shelters. She mentions adopting orphaned children enough times for Baatar to know she is projecting, but he finds himself fantasizing about raising the children with her regardless. She fills his head with ideas of fixing the broken system of tyranny in the government and protecting all its citizens. He begins to draw up blueprints of machines and buildings for her vision during work time and hiding them from his father, who laughs at the prospect of "Junior" working on projects independently. When he starts thinking of his own ideas and sharing them with Kuvira, the vision becomes half his, something only the two of them can share.

Kuvira thinks it mostly a fantasy that she could ever leave. She wants nothing more than to help the world, to spread the spirit of unity and charity that Su and Zaofu bred in her heart. But a future of one day Su arranging a marriage between her and Baatar, and then living out her days on the Beifong estate in safety and domesticity spreads out in her mind, a sense of inevitability clinging to the possibility. Though when she looks at Baatar, sees him tripping over himself while running towards her or getting overly excited about new math discoveries, she realizes she could accept a life with him even without adventure.

Still, they have their delusions of grandeur. Every caged bird wishes to see a bluer sky.

He is twenty four when Opal gets her bending and the Avatar comes calling. He doesn't talk to anyone, not even Kuvira, for a full day. Su introduces the children: Huan, the artistic metalbender, Wei and Wing, the twin metalbending prodigies, and now Opal, gifted with the rarest of the bending arts and blessed with the Avatar's presence. Meanwhile, he is given a half second introduction on the tails of his father. They do not join the Avatar for dinner. His father wants him to work overtime in exchange for the time he's been spending out of the house. He later watches Wei and Wing spar with the Avatar and her stocky friend from his attic window over a few blueprints, and doesn't even bother trying to blot the tearstains running down his page.

Of course, where the Avatar goes, trouble follows her. Kuvira is the twenty three year old leader of the security team, and is on watch the night the Avatar is captured. She is daydreaming, half asleep, when the idiotic earthbending friend of the Avatar who can't even learn to bend a meteorite runs out screaming bloody murder and rouses her and her shift partner to action. It isn't long until she realizes two things: Zaheer and his group are here for blood, and she can't do anything about it. The power of one human doesn’t amount to much, especially not against the four revolutionaries.

The lavabending is like nothing she’s ever seen, and the psychic firebender takes out the spotlights like they’re the paper lamps of Zaofu festivals. When her partner draws Zaheer away from their moat, she thinks they have him, but the airbender proves too fast, and it is not a long fight until she is thrown by a gust of his wind onto the ground. The last thing she remembers of the battle is the ringing sound after her head hits the inside of her helmet.

Baatar is woken by the sound of explosions. The night has already been difficult enough. Opal is gone, her sending forth party filled with the ever present comparisons to his father and reminder of his lack of bending. Varrick still doesn't even know his name, once even mistaking him for Zhu Li then giving an empty excuse that "the glasses confused me".

So when he hears the sound of firebombs in the middle of the night, he is a bit miffed. He wonders what the Avatar could possibly be doing now, then eventually pads into his workroom to look out into the courtyard. The sight of the lava moat, explosions lighting up the sky, and metal flying everywhere is enough to quickly pull him out of his half asleep state. He takes it in as fast as he can, trying to understand what's happening. His mother, his brothers, his aunt, the Avatar's entourage, all fighting those revolutionaries they were so worried about.

It doesn't even take him a minute to scan the different guards fighting to find her. She is face down on the ground, disheveled hair poking out from underneath the helmet, but something is undeniably and immediately recognizable about her figure, even underneath the armor. He fights the urge to run to her, knowing it wouldn't help, and would only place himself in danger. He looks helplessly on as the group disappears in ash and still Kuvira lays, unmoving, on the ground.

When he is sure it is safe, he sprints down the stairs and into the courtyard to kneel beside her. He can only imagine what they've done to her, and he gently rolls her over and pushes off the helmet. There is a deep dent in the back, and a strangled cry escapes his throat. 

To observers, it is, in some sick way, a placid scene. Baatar sits at her side, one hand holding her head and the other arm wrapped around her waist. She could be asleep; laying peacefully, hair splayed out around her, eyes closed. Wei watches his older brother bend over the woman everyone knows he loves, and if he didn't know that Baatar was checking Kuvira's breathing, it would seem as if he was leaning in to kiss her.

When she wakes, it is to his knitted brow, to his bit lip, to his skinny arms around her. She slips into a soft smile unconsciously and sits up, placing a hand on his shoulder.

Kuvira is fine, no concussion, and is set out immediately with her team to search the city. When they find nothing and report back to Su, there is nothing left to do but clean up for the night. She is unraveling the wrap she wears on her legs, sitting in the guard locker room alone, when she hears the unmistakable steps of Baatar. He looks at her with eyes that are so soft, wringing his hands in a pattern she knows he counts off, “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4”, in his head. She whispers his name into the empty. His eyes linger on her lips, and she is compelled to stand, realizing for the first time that he has grown taller than her. She wonders when he overtook her in size, when she had started to notice the angle of his jaw in a way different than romantically, when she had begun to be drawn to the magnetism of his body, not only of his soul, when the fire in the pit of her stomach had been lit, and where it had come from. It wasn’t the first time she had wanted him to kiss her, but the first time the desire had been intoxicating, overwhelming all her senses until it's just him and that smile he gives her and the closeness of the two as she slowly moves toward him.

He starts to take a step back and she catches his arm, saying his name again. His eyes flick to her lips again. She could kiss him if she wanted, she knows, but suddenly he is speaking.

“I thought you might have died tonight, Kuvira,” and the way he says her name is like flower petals, flower petals she used to lace on her words, "I don't think I could stand it here anymore if I lost you." He isn't the most elegant speaker, but it is enough to get the point across, and his mouth hangs open a bit as the words sit between them.

“I'm fine, Baatar, I only blacked out. But thank you, I'm glad you came.” She pauses. “I've always loved-” and her voice catches on “loved”, and she doesn't need to say any more, and he understands by the look in her eye and the quiver on her lip, and she closes the distance between them, and his arm is still in her hand, shaking, and ever so slowly she pushes herself onto delicate tip-toes, and he looks so nervous, and she is too, and she looks him dead in the eyes before closing her own and fitting her lips snugly against his. 

Baatar sinks into it immediately, years of pining for her into one moment, feeling her hands move to his cheeks and her lips pressed onto his. His hands fall instinctively to her waist, and all he can do is hold her while his mind cannot think anything but her name.

Baatar is twenty four and Kuvira is twenty three, they are adults, but as soon as they become a “we”, it's like they are children again. There is a blissful few days spent exploring what it means to be whatever they are, hiding it from Su, his mother and her boss, who would probably be okay with the relationship if it weren't so detracting from their work. He's skirting his father and dropping his blueprints to run with her behind the security center and kiss, she is slacking off and distracted on shift as he walks past her and teases her.

Baatar worries the entire day when she and Su go to fight the Red Lotus, and buries himself in work to ignore his fear, only resting when they all return safe and, for the most part, undamaged. Kuvira tells him with a goofy smile how she saved the Avatar’s father from falling to his death, and he holds her hands in his own as they sit on the couch in the estate, one they used to as children, now with significantly less distance between them.

It isn’t even a full week until President Raiko comes by airship and has a private meeting with Su. She comes home fuming, refusing to talk about it. Baatar doesn’t know why she gives him an angry glare until he sees Kuvira the next day and learns how she spoke up to Su. Kuvira also asks, offhandedly, if Baatar still has the blueprints he used to make for their old plans. He nods, and knows without her telling him that she plans to leave and take Su’s place in Ba Sing Se.

Kuvira is twenty three when she realizes Su will not help those who need it, twenty three when she realizes both her and the kingdom deserve more than the back of Su’s hand, twenty three when she decides to leave.

He is twenty four, and he is already in love with her.

She crawls on top of him and kisses him hard when he eagerly agrees to leave with her, on the same couch they’ve always loved, her hair tickling his face, and their teeth smacking together as they laugh, in pure joy over knowing they are going to change the world, together. When Su walks in and Kuvira’s lips are on Baatar’s neck, she goes a dark shade of red and walks out. Kuvira leaves, her hands lingering on Baatar’s arm as she rushes out.

Kuvira lies in bed that night, thinking about plans and hopes and her anger at Su. Her hair is wet and braided for the night, her bangs long and damp and stuck in the corner of her eye. Kuvira thinks of Su again, and on a whim twists her bangs with her finger and, pinching them, tries to pull them back into her hairband. They're a bit too short, but she thinks it's time for a new hairdo.

Ambition lights up her mind, and she imagines reuniting Ba Sing Se, and then moving forward to other states and cities, ridding the kingdom, no, her empire, of bandits and criminals for good. She would get Su's support eventually, and the Avatar would no doubt help once she finished healing. Rolling onto her side, she falls easily into a long, deep sleep.

The plans fall together like her dance students in a perfectly choreographed routine, and before she knows it, they are leaving, the airships packed, and Su's love lost. Kuvira is twenty three, she hasn't had parents for four years, but looking back at her savior's broken expression as they fly away, she feels acutely the tearing of her soul she knows all too well. Baatar pulls her into an embrace, and holds her for three years.

She is twenty six when she returns to Zaofu, and is a different woman. Baatar is twenty seven, and a different man. Now he trusts her without question to hold the knife of love to his throat and not slice, and she can have all the power she wants knowing he still holds an unbreakable one of his own over her. 

He is twenty seven and has known her for eighteen years when she does for the first time something he doesn't anticipate; pulling that knife across his throat, though the motion in reality is the raising of her arm and the fire of her cannon. She is twenty six, and has everything she could ever dream of in her gloved hand, when in that one motion everything spills out of her grip. 

Kuvira is twenty six, yet is eight again when someone who once protected her abandons her, this time not on the side of the road but in a wooden cell. Her hair has been stripped of its steel pins, now falling around her shoulders, her gloves confiscated, leaving her to sit alone and stare at the ring that they both mercied and condemned her by not taking it away.

He visits her, her name no longer dropping from his tongue like flower petals, all the while hiding behind his mother. Kuvira, only twenty six, now knows she never truly had anyone that she could hide behind.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! I had bunch of random ideas for baavira childhood snapshots floating around in my head and I finally decided to throw them all together. This took me wayyyy to long to write for something that's not even 5.4k. Anyway, you can find me on tumblr at roxymir.tumblr.com , and I'm probably going to post some more writing in the future. I don't really know yet, I just love these two dictators in love.


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